Friday, April 12, 2013

:Yours, Mine And Ours

I suppose I should take heart in this sentiment: I just don't get Glenn Beck. He was in a tizzy, which is pretty much a constant state for Mister Beck, about an ad that ran on MSNBC featuring these words from anchor Melissa Harris-Perry: "We have never invested as much in public education as we should have
because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid
is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very
collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have
to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities." Don't think that this has anything to do with that "it takes a village" pablum that Hillary Clinton was spouting a few years back. Glenn believes that the socialists are coming for your children. It's only a matter of time before the jackboots kick in your door and carry them, screaming into the night, shoving them onto cattle cars for their eventual destination: re-education camps.
This re-education is happening right now, according to the Beckster, in the form of new curriculum being introduced in our public schools. Common Core, specifically, is responsible for "dumbing down America." This comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since I thought Glenn pretty much had that covered, but back to the sound and fury: "It de-emphasizes literary works like Huckleberry Finn in favor of
informational texts including song lyrics and government documents. And, of course, historical documents like the Gettysburg Address are going to be taught without any kind of context."
"This is just the beginning," Glenn said, “And it has to be stopped.”
It couldn't be that this reform comes about during a Democratic administration, and the reforms visited by No Child Left Behind are perfectly acceptable since they were introduced under a different regime. It does make me wonder what sort of educational reform will be available in his utopian community, Independence, U.S.A. Maybe his own forces will come to rescue our children from the re-education camps so they can take them to his.
"Our children?" Sorry, Glenn. "Your children."